Why our pricing page shows a floor, not a price
There is a question in the FAQ on our own pricing page that deserves a straight answer: why won’t you just show me a price?
That page belongs to the company I run. I founded it in 2019, I am a registered nurse, and it is the business named in my bio, so I am not neutral about any of this. What follows is a pricing decision I made, what it costs, and why I would make it again.
First, a correction to the way people usually describe us. Our pricing page is full of numbers. From $49 a week for a full sixteen-week semester. From $59 for a standard twelve-week course. From $69 for a short, accelerated one. A single assignment from $30.
What it does not have is a button that says “this class, this price, pay now.” There is no single figure, and that is deliberate.
A flat price has to be wrong for someone
Two courses with the same title on a transcript can be entirely different jobs.
One is eight weeks of discussion posts and two short reflective papers. Another is a graduate statistics course with weekly problem sets, a dataset to clean, and an analysis that has to be defensible. Same credit hours. Nothing like the same effort, and not the same specialist.
A single price has to land somewhere between those two. Wherever it lands, it is wrong for someone. Either it overcharges the student with the lighter course to subsidise the heavier one, or it underquotes the heavier one.
The first is unfair. The second is worse, because the shortfall has to come from somewhere.
Where the underquote goes
A business that advertises a price too low to cover the hard jobs has three ways to make up the difference. None of them is visible on the day you pay.
It can quietly narrow what “the class” means, so that the quizzes, the discussions or the final turn out to be extras. It can hand the hard job to whoever is cheapest rather than whoever knows the subject. Or it can let the number move once the student is committed and the deadline is close, which is exactly the moment they have the least power to say no.
That last one is the surprise fee, and it is one of the most common complaints about this industry.
I do not assume the people who charge it set out to. I think a flat price pushes them there. Once you have advertised a number that does not cover the work, something has to give, and it is rarely the advertisement.
That is the whole argument. A single headline price is not a neutral piece of information. It creates an incentive, and the incentive points at the student.
What we publish instead
We publish floors. They are real starting points, and anyone can check whether a quote sits above them. We also publish the ranges most single pieces fall into, so a student can tell whether a figure is ordinary before they ever speak to us.
Get Andrea Falcon’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Then each engagement gets one fixed, all-in figure, agreed in writing before any work begins. The only thing that changes it is a change the student asks for, and even then they see and approve the new figure first. On most first engagements, the opening task is done before any money is due, so the first thing a student pays for is work they have already seen.
That is the trade. We give up the tempting headline. In return, the number a student is given is the number they pay.
The floors matter more than they might appear to. A quote with no anchor at all is as hard to judge as a flat price is to trust. Publishing where pricing starts is what turns “it depends” from an evasion into something a reader can check.
What it costs us
It would be dishonest to call this free.
It costs speed. A student who wants an answer this minute gets a person instead, usually within about two hours. Some people will not wait that long, and I understand why. Someone three weeks behind wants the problem solved, not discussed.
It costs us in comparison. Line several sites up side by side and the one with a single bold number looks simpler, and simple is persuasive when you are anxious. Our page asks the reader to do a little more thinking than a price button does.
And it costs the headline. The conventional wisdom is that a big, low number on the front page converts better. That may well be true. I have not tested it, and I will not put a figure on what we lose that I could not defend.
What I would check, anywhere
Most people arrive having typed some version of pay someone to take my class into a search bar, and the first thing they look for is a number to compare. I understand the instinct, but I would not start there, with anyone’s figures, including ours.
I would ask one question instead: can this number move after I say yes?
If the answer is no, and the person can tell you exactly what the figure covers, you have something worth comparing. If the answer is vague, the headline price was never the real price. It was the opening offer.
The honest answer to “what will it cost?”
The messages we receive rarely start with a budget. They start with something like take my class for me, and then, a line later, the question of what that costs.
The honest reply has two parts. The first is that it depends on the course, and here is where it starts. The second, once someone has actually read the syllabus, is a single number that does not change afterwards.
That second part is the one that matters. Anyone can publish a low figure. The harder thing, and the thing I think a student is really buying, is a figure that is still true at the end of the term.
